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Modeling Human Communication Dynamics

Speaker
Louis-Philippe Morency
Assistant Professor, Language Technology Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
NSH 1305

Video
Video link

Description

Human face-to-face communication is a little like a dance, in that participants continuously adjust their behaviors based on verbal and nonverbal cues from the social context. Today's computers and interactive devices are still lacking many of these human-like abilities to hold fluid and natural interactions. Leveraging recent advances in machine learning, audio-visual signal processing and computational linguistic, my research focuses on creating computational technologies able to analyze, recognize and predict human subtle communicative behaviors in social context. I formalize this new research endeavor with a Human Communication Dynamics framework, addressing four key computational challenges: behavioral dynamic, multimodal dynamic, interpersonal dynamic and societal dynamic. Central to this research effort is the introduction of new probabilistic models able to learn the temporal and fine-grained latent dependencies across behaviors, modalities and interlocutors. In this talk, I will present some of our recent achievements modeling multiple aspects of human communication dynamics, motivated by applications in healthcare (depression, PTSD, suicide, autism), education (learning analytics), business (negotiation, interpersonal skills) and social multimedia (opinion mining, social influence).

Speaker's Bio

Louis-Philippe Morency is Assistant Professor in the Language Technology Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University where he leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory (MultiComp Lab). He received his Ph.D. and Master degrees from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2008, Dr. Morency was selected as one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems. He has received 7 best paper awards in multiple ACM- and IEEE-sponsored conferences for his work on context-based gesture recognition, multimodal probabilistic fusion and computational models of human communication dynamics. Dr. Morency was lead Co-PI for the DARPA-funded multi-institution effort called SimSensei which was recently named one of the year’s top ten most promising digital initiatives by the NetExplo Forum, in partnership with UNESCO.

Speaker's Website
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~morency/